If you mean SS less as in IT-PS at the beginning of every rotation... then yea, 1 less SS every now and then. I guess I was assuming you may have to do that anway even with SS glyph.

There are some hidden buffs, if you actually read all the notes. Ghouls will now scale with Expertise (unfortunately still not crit rating), and this may also let Gargoyle and Army scale with hit/expertise. Having Gargoyle sit on the ground might help fix it's issues hitting things with odd hitboxes like XT's heart, Kologarn, and Yogg-Saron's brain. The new Alchemy exclusive Strength flask could prove quite powerful. Could be worse. (see: tanking nerfs)

What are you talking about? Unholy has to put 60+ points into it just to get all of the dps talents, Blood and Frost just go straight down and have a ton of free points to spend. Blood even has 3 points that it has to waste on healing talents just to get to Dancing Rune Weapon.

Not to mention Morbidity is probably going to be a much better talent now considering Unholy Blight now does damage over time based on your death coil damage.

I think I get what they might be going for with BS, SS, and desecration/desolation. First, I'm assuming that the diseases bonus on blood strike is being increased to 50%, not being set to 50%, making it 18.75% per disease. 50% per disease would be obscene -- even if that is their intention, it will never make it live. Now, consider ditching reaping, and always using the blood runes for blood strike, glyphing blood strike (bye bye UB glyph), and speccing for both desecration and desolation.

SS with 3 diseases will hit for (0.70512*WPN + 629.65), including the effects of outbreak and ebon plague.
BS with 3 diseases will hit for (0.75000*WPN + 573.00), before armor, including the glyph of blood strike -- that 20% on the glyph is the PvE value of the new desecration.

Before armor, they are similar hits. At 1120 weapon damage they are equal, more weapon damage actually favors blood strike (but again, before armor reduction). At 6% mitigation from armor, they scale equally, and SS hits for a flat 91 damage more than BS.

Use of all 6 runes is always either PS, IT, SS, 2xBS; or 2xSS 2xBS (no particular order). So, BS is used more often than SS, so it makes it a significant portion of your damage, thus making it worth glyphing BS and wearing ArPen (possibly).

So, armor penetration gets some value for Unholy, by affecting a much large portion of our damage; and our damage stays high-ish in a PvE environment with lots of ArPen and lots of armor debuffs, while we don't have quite as much armor-ignoring burst in PvP. I think these are both blizzard's goals, and it homogenizes the specs and stat wieghts a bit, which makes it easier to provide good gear for everyone without bloating loot tables.

We're going to have to see some final changes and get a clarification on the BS buff numbers, and figure out what the value of armor penetration becomes and how much we will tend to have, but I wouldn't be surprised if our single-target PvE DPS survives this; it just changes up what we do and why it works. I suspect UB is a single-target buff as well, since it gives us UB benefit passively, so I wouldn't be too shocked if we actually move up a bit o high-end gearing with the appropriate level of ArPen.

I've been doing a good little unholy job so far of ignoring ArPen, and so I don't really have a good feel for what kind of armor reduction we will really be looking at. If someone more used to the ArPen math/numbers from available gear can weigh in, I'd appreciate it.

(and now for the pulling-stuff-out-of-my ass part of the show)
If blood strike really is +50% per diseases, it wont last long. +50% of base for a third disease is just way too much and puts too much value on going 36 into unholy for 1/3 crypt fever. That plus DRM could put together some unwanted scaling that pushes people away from going deep into trees, which blizzard doesn't seem to like. Expect Threat of Thassarian to be on the fourth tier or higher so that there wont be another mongrel DW tri-spec focused on white damage, DW white damage in UP with fast IUP runes, and a +150% modifier on BS with 3 diseases.

The question is how the Desolation talent will affect use of BS. I can't imagine they would want to basically negate the use of death runes, but it seems inelegant to take Desolation for a 5% damage buff 12s out of every 20s.

It still isn't as bad as the old Desecration in that (1) you don't have to stand in the right place to be buffed and (2) you will definitely blood strike at least every other rune set, whereas a lucky string of SS glyph procs could keep you from PSing for a long time under old Desecration.

I don't see much of a DPS loss from the 3.2 stuff. Aside from AoE these changes don't look like a net nerf.

Scourge Strike change- roughly -10% Scourge Strike damage. Probably a -3% DPS loss overall.

Unholy Blight change- Back when people were trying to figure out talent weights for the 3.1 changes, people were calling UB a 2% overall DPS increase over just dumping all your RP into death coils. Take your total damage from RP abilities, subtract 2%, and multiply by 1.3, and you'll have some approximation for the gain from the new UB. Probably a 3-4% DPS increase, more if you glyph it. (Which you may not, see Desolation.)

Gargoyle change- effectively this change just reduces the RP cost of gargoyle, freeing up more RP for death coils. DPS gain is sub-1%, but it's there.

Ghoul expertise change- Ghoul sims as 12% of my DPS. I'll call this a 1% DPS increase.

Desolation- Assuming you don't modify your rotation to compensate for this, you lose 5% DPS 40% of the time, or 2% DPS overall. It's possible that glyphing plague strike, bloodtapping on the pull, and alternating BS-PS / PS-BS instead of BSx2 / SS might be worth the marginal loss from glyphing and using plague strike. That sounds harder to figure out so I'll go with the worst case, 2%.

Blood Strike change- Blood Strike: The bonus damage this ability receives from diseases on the target has been increased to 50% per disease. See if you can spot the typo in this sentence! Blood strike buffed by an unknown amount. I'll call this another sub-1% DPS increase because I have no idea what Blizzard meant to type here.


Adding all these up I get about zero. These numbers are really napkinmathy and based on no testing whatsoever but they should be close. I don't think any of this was intended as an unholy single-target nerf, and if there is any damage loss here it's nothing that would be provable outside of simulation.

Actually, I believe what it very well may be possible what they're trying to do is force us to use Ghoul Frenzy in the second half of the rotation and keep Reaping. Though it is speculation, the logic is there. Blizzard wouldn't overlook the Death Rune talent, let alone the massive complaints I'm sure they've heard about Ghoul Frenzy and the lack of use it has seen in PvE. Also take into consideration the buffs to the Ghoul; Ghoul Frenzy becomes a stronger talent. However, the worth of Ghoul Frenzy becomes dependent on the value of Reaping, essentially making it 3 talent points for 100% Ghoul Frenzy uptime. Also in a 20 second rotation, 1/3 of the value of Ghoul Frenzy as a sole talent point is lost as the 10 seconds extra are wasted.

Needless to say, Death Coil will now be more widely used now that more RP is freed. Hence, with the UB change Morbidity gains value, as does the glyph and the sigil, as was stated. This information even being posted is assuming that Blood Strike isn't buffed to all hell as the wording makes it out to be, which would probably cost you the DD glyph for the Blood Strike glyph as stated by Stampy.

From this post it seems the reason for SS/FS nerf is PvP related and the intent is not to nerf damage overall but to "spread" it: BS buff should compensate SS/FS nerf. Also from the reply on Desacration seems clear that Desacration and Desolation will not be linked.

I doubt desecration will be a pre-req for desolation, as from that post above the blue mentioned making it so things were not obstructed by desecration's ground effect.

You could simply use a rotation that leaves out blood plague in the first set of runes:
IT - SS - BS- (BT + BS) - SS
PS - SS - BS - SS

It's a bit of a hassle exactly like this, but something along those lines might just be working.

What Invisus wrote, might also be a usable rotation. (2 sets of runes with 2 BS each and supplicate one for a ghoul frenzy every third set.)

This flask won't replace Endless Rage. It will have quite same value as x2 ring enchants for alchemy or 2 gem slots for BS. Point is to give alchemy extra stat benefit while PvP/solo (like other professions do) not only when you raid (use flask) like now on live.

I know it wouldnt work the normal way, but if you simply wait for the U rune from the first SS to activate and then ps + ss, you'd lose 1 gcd but had the runes with a 8.5 sec respawn. I was thinking along those lines, but yeah, I guess yours would work a bit smoother. Mine might be a little more balanced because you have 4 strikes in each set after the first one.

Judging by this post form GC, I would say they actually set the damage bonus to 50% and have since brought it down from there.

Personally I wasn't surprised when I saw the "to 50%" buff on Blood Strike. Ghostcrawler has said in the past that they didn't like how Heart Strike was a complete replacement over BS and they thought of making BS the ability to use for single target while HS being the multi-target attack of the Blood tree. Plus there's the added benefit that regardless of spec, everyone can use BS which could lead to an increase in TPS or make up for the nerfs to Frost Strike and, in our case, Scourge Strike.

I think that this rotation makes the most sense to me as well. The loss of the first Global Cooldown makes me annoyed, but in the long-run, this would make for more overall DPS. This assumes one uses Desolation of course.

Since it seems that Blizzard wants us to basically roll death coils like a stacking DoT (need confirmation on that?), part of me wants to stay away from Desolation and get some benefit from other talents. I already know that due to the Blood Strike improvement, the fact that my raid made me put points into blood (Subversion) for aggro reduction will be somewhat more useful, even if its a really really low improvement. In addition, one could put points in butchery if they want more runic on fights where there's a lot of AoE thrown out, and just for the tiny passive runic. Surely with the change to Unholy Blight and the new Glyph change, this could be better than a .6 percent per point that desolation would be.

On the other hand, the analytical side of me sees how keeping points in Desolation with the rotation you described may output better DPS assuming one can get that last Blood Strike in before diseases wear off. Having one of the death runes popping up early will definitely be annoying at first, which is generally what happens when one either screws up rotations or some movement is involved and the rotation has to be changed. Overall it will have less of a "solid" feel to it, like you're always off-kilter, and it will be weird using a death rune with a frost or unholy rune instead of using both death runes together. But I'm fairly sure the good DK's will be able to work it out.

If one wanted to keep AoE in the mix, there's a few things you can do I suppose. I can already see Corpse Explosion being used a lot more as we won't be using that runic for an Unholy Blight. Though with the Glyph Change, one couldn't use the DnD glyph. Main problem with AoE is that one wouldn't be able to benefit from Desolation at all if things die too quickly. I find it tough to fit in IT PS Pest before things die anymore. :/ Let alone shoving another GCD into the mix. And if one did actually Blood Strike before the rotation for AoE, you'd find yourself DnDing, IT PS and not having a blood rune for Pestilence.

On other notes: I don't see how it makes Armor Pen more interesting for Unholy DK's. If anything, the Unholy Blight change will make it even more useless, even if Blood Strike is buffed and Scourge Strike somewhat nerfed. I'm more pissed at the tanking nerfs to be honest. Bliz needs to make up their mind what they want us to be. I'm almost thinking that Bliz just wants all DK's to have two DPS specs, one for AoE on Trash and one for bosses. My guild mate does that already, but I tank as well. Time to focus on making two DPS specs I guess. *shrug*

The problem is it flies in the face of existing DK design. Each tree has an new ability that supercedes an existing one (BS -> HS, OB-> SS, DC-> FS) and each has a talent for converting your weakest strikes into death runes for your most powerful.

If BS is now so good why would we even want reaping or death runes? There's ghoul frenzy but that's the only use really and with an effective cost of 3 talent points you're probably better off just looking elsewhere to spend your points.

A 12 second buff triggering from a Blood Rune ability works totally counter to Reaping, SS, and the SS Glyph. Talents in the same tree shouldn't compete with each other like that, they should works towards a common, focused end.

That was their goal originally. To make everything work together towards a common goal and have them work with a certain flavor. In my opinion, its just that they actually got it right with DK's in terms of synergy, but they still don't have the other classes down pat yet. To them, the Unholy Synergy is perhaps too good. And so that instead of somehow improving the other classes and their synergy, they've decided to take a hammer and put a chip in what otherwise is perfect synergy.

They did say they would rather nerf than buff. But no sense complaining about it, what good will it do? At this point any complaining we do will just result in another class getting nerfed because we complained about it.

Either way, I think that the suggestions put forth so far are all wonderful, but its hard to say until the actual patch date. I do feel that people who didn't see some sort of nerf coming to Unholy dps weren't living in the real world, but you're right, this type of weird nerf and completely screws up the playstyle to the point where they need to refund everyone's talents was kind of unnecessary out of left field. If they had simply limited the number of targets Unholy Blight could hit, or made the buff from Blood Strike a 20 second buff, that would be one thing. But now it just feels like they need yet another patch to fix all those issues.

But we're not Devs, we just play the game, so time to theorycraft on the numbers I suppose.

Also, I quite like the new Unholy Blight. Freeing up the 40 RP every 30 seconds (considering the glyph) is 80 more RP for DC's per minute. With each DC being fired at 70% damage over time, the ~4 DC's we'll fire off every 30 seconds will be translated to 280% damage of a DC every 30 seconds. If I'm not mistaken that's even better than the old UB for single target. We simply lose the AoE portion. Maxing Morbidity, glyphing for DD and grabbing the sigil will push it leaps and bounds above the old UB. Also removes the hassle of having one more timer to watch and button to push.

Another question is if the UB DoT debuff is going to be a disease or a magic. It's likely going to be a magic debuff, but I can dream.

The glyph will only increase the effect of Unholy Blight by 40%. The effect is 30% of your DC damage, so it's only 12 additional percent, bringing UB to 42% of your DC damage, not 70.

Are you sure about that? Granted we've been getting lost in their meaning behind the 50% to Blood Strike, but I do suppose that 70% would be overkill. However, considering some of their changes I wouldn't put "overkill" past them.

Wow Web Stats

Average of 3,482 DC sans SotVH with max points in Morbidity.

You're probably right, so that will end up as 42*4 = 168% of a DC every 30 seconds. From my same parse UB up for 5'05" at 97% uptime it has done 87,683 damage compared to DC's 98,387. A complete removal of the UB damage and increase of the DC damage by 42% with an added 3,482*2 damage every minute for 5 minutes from freed RP results in:

6964*5 = 34820 + 98387 = 133207

42% of 133207 is 55946.94, essentially what UB becomes.

Comparing the damage of the current UB vs. the upcoming UB is:

55946
_____ * 100 = 63.08%

87683

Unholy Blight without the Sigil is taking a ~37% single-target hit if my math is correct.

Except your maths is wrong (and a fight with a 17% crit rate on DC, really?). The number of DC casts you've made is skewed by your gargoyle casts - in each case you've chosen to sacrifice DC's for the RP for gargoyle. Which isn't wrong in 3.1, but prioritising UB over DC when casting gargoyle isn't a decision you have to make in 3.2.

So lets assume a 30s window during which you have no gargoyle casts. You would gain, assuming no glyph of SS, 125 RP per 20 rotation (PS + IT + 2BS + 4SS) or 187.5 RP total (assuming no butchery, arcane torrent etc which would play in DC's favour).

That 187.5 RP is 4.6875 x 40 RP. So

3.1: 3.6875 DC + 1 UB = 12839 + 8820 = 21659
3.2: 4.6875 DC * 1.3 = 6.09375 DC = 21218.

Or roughly no difference. And I've given UB the benefit of the doubt in terms of no extra RP generation and the lousy 17% DC crit rate (I've given DC the benefit of the doubt on not using glyph of SS for potentially - 5 less RP, but overall the calculations are more generous towards UB).

With that in mind it seems unlikely that UB glyph would boost UB to 70% of DC damage.

To compare it to the most similar glyph, DD (assume you're using both, although it doesn't make much difference to the end result)

If it's 40% more UB damage then:

Glyph of DD: 0.15 x (1 + (0.3 x 1.4)) = 21.3% more damage per DC.
Glyph of UB: 0.4 x (1.15 x 0.3) = 13.8% more damage

If it's +40% DC damage to UB then

Glyph of DD: 0.15 x (1 + 0.3 + 0.4) = 25.5% more damage per DC
Glyph of UB: 1.15 x 0.4 = 46% more damage per DC.


So the UB glyph would be either vastly better or considerably worse than DD.